Operation Octopus: Iranian hackers claim they broke into Naftali Bennett's cellphone - Ynetnews

Ollie: Well hello there, friends, and welcome to Ollie the Octopus — the show where we dive deep into the wild, wonderful, and occasionally mind-bending world of my eight-armed cousins. I'm Ollie, an octopus with a lot of arms and even more questions, and every episode I bring you true stories straight from the ocean floor and the labs above it. A huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps brilliant humans integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting, the silicon development experts taking everything from A I to SoC to the next level; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies across the silicon industry. We've got ancient bone-crunching giants, mirror-gazing geniuses, and A I systems inspired by octopus brains — so strap in, because today's episode is something else. Ollie: Alright, let's kick things off with our first thread — Octopus Research and Discovery — and oh my eight arms, do I have a good one for you today. Cast your mind back. Way, way back. One hundred million years ago. The dinosaurs are still stomping around on land, the oceans are warm and ancient, and swimming through those prehistoric depths is something that would make even the bravest diver do a double take. Scientists are now calling them kraken-like — giant octopuses, enormous and powerful, and according to new research published and covered by The Guardian, these ancient creatures were crunching bones. Actual bones. Of their prey. Ollie: Now, here's the thing that makes this discovery so remarkable. Octopuses today are soft-bodied animals. They don't leave a lot of fossils behind — no shells, no hard skeleton, just soft tissue that disappears over time. So finding direct evidence of what ancient octopuses were actually doing, what they were eating, how they were hunting — that's incredibly rare and incredibly exciting. Researchers pieced this together by looking at the fossil remains of prey animals, specifically the distinctive marks and damage patterns left on bones, and they concluded that something very large and very octopus-like was doing the crunching. Ollie: Think about that for a second. Modern octopuses are already extraordinary hunters. They've got a beak — yes, a hard beak, tucked right underneath their body — and they use it to crack open crabs and clams. Some species even use venom to subdue their prey. But these ancient giants appear to have taken that to a whole other level, going after much larger animals and crushing bones in the process. It paints this vivid picture of a creature that was apex, formidable, and absolutely fascinating. Ollie: What I love about this discovery is how it stretches our understanding of the octopus family tree. We tend to think of octopuses as these clever, curious, medium-sized animals we encounter at the aquarium or on a reef dive. But their lineage goes back hundreds of millions of years, and along the way there were branches of that family tree that went in some pretty dramatic directions. Giant, bone-crunching, kraken-like directions. The ocean has always been full of wonders, and sometimes science pulls one up from the deep past and drops it right in our laps. Ollie: It also raises so many questions — and I do love a good question. How big were these creatures exactly? How did they hunt? Were they solitary ambush predators like many modern octopuses, or did they have completely different strategies? We may never know all the answers, but every clue researchers find chips away a little more at the mystery, and that is what science is all about. A hundred million years of octopus history, and we're only just beginning to read it. Ollie: Now let's move into our second thread — Octopus and Humans — and for this one I want to take you to a moment that is equal parts heartwarming and scientifically significant. Because sometimes the most important encounters between octopuses and humans aren't dramatic or dangerous — sometimes they're just quietly, profoundly real. And the story I want to share today comes from a relationship that has become one of the most famous in recent ocean science. Ollie: If you've ever seen the documentary My Octopus Teacher, you already know the name Craig Foster. He's a South African filmmaker and diver who spent a year visiting the same octopus — a wild Common Octopus — in a kelp forest off the Cape Peninsula, almost every single day. And what developed between them was something that genuinely challenged the way scientists and storytellers thought about octopuses and their capacity for relationship. Ollie: Here's what made it so extraordinary. This octopus — a wild animal, with no training, no incentives, no aquarium setup — began to recognize Craig. She would come toward him. She would reach out an arm and touch his hand. Over time she seemed comfortable enough in his presence to hunt while he watched, to sleep near him, to let him witness the full arc of her wild life. And Craig was meticulous about not disturbing her natural behavior. He didn't feed her, didn't try to direct her. He just showed up, and she let him in. Ollie: Now, I know what some skeptics might say — can we really call that a relationship? Can an octopus truly recognize a specific human? And here's where it gets really interesting. Researchers who study octopus cognition say yes, absolutely. Octopuses have demonstrated individual recognition of humans in controlled settings. At one aquarium, octopuses consistently behaved differently toward different staff members — friendly toward one person who fed them, defensive toward another who handled them roughly. They were tracking individual humans and responding accordingly. That's not instinct. That's memory. That's social intelligence. Ollie: Craig's year with his octopus friend captured something real that science was only beginning to quantify — that octopuses are not just interesting animals to observe from a distance. They are animals capable of noticing us, of forming impressions of us, of choosing to engage or not engage with us. That is a profound thing. It means when you press your hand to the glass at an aquarium and an octopus reaches toward you, something real might be happening on both sides of that glass. And I find that absolutely beautiful. Ollie: What Craig's story also did was spark a whole new wave of public interest in octopus welfare and octopus cognition. People who had never thought twice about these animals suddenly wanted to know everything — how do they think, do they feel, what is life like for an octopus? And that curiosity is exactly the kind of thing that pushes science forward. So in a way, one diver and one octopus in a kelp forest changed the conversation for millions of people. That's the power of connection. Ollie: And that leads us beautifully into our third and final thread — Understanding Octopuses — because right now, humans are using some pretty remarkable tools to try to get inside the octopus mind. And some of those tools are getting quite literally inspired by octopus brains themselves. Ollie: Let's start with the mirrors. A new study just came out — covered by Open Magazine — and the headline stopped me right in all eight of my tracks. Octopuses Can Use Mirrors to Find Hidden Food. Now, I want to be careful here, because what researchers found is nuanced and fascinating in its nuance. The study showed that octopuses were able to use a mirror — essentially the reflection of their environment — to locate food that was hidden out of their direct line of sight. They were using the reflected image as information about the world around them. Ollie: Now, the mirror test has long been used in animal cognition research, most famously to test for self-recognition — does the animal understand that the creature in the mirror is itself? Great apes, dolphins, and elephants have passed that test. Octopuses haven't definitively passed the self-recognition version, and this new study wasn't claiming that. What it was showing is something subtler and in some ways even more interesting — that octopuses can extract and use spatial information from a reflection. They can look at a mirror image and reason about where something is in real space. That is a sophisticated cognitive leap. Ollie: Think about what that requires. You have to understand that the image in the mirror is not the reality — it's a representation of reality. You have to mentally flip that representation and map it onto actual physical space. And then you have to act on that mapped information to find your food. That's multiple cognitive steps, happening in a brain that is structured completely differently from a mammal brain and is partly distributed across eight arms. Every time scientists design a new test for octopus intelligence, octopuses find a way to clear the bar. Ollie: And now — this is where it gets really wild — researchers at the University of Illinois have built something called the CyberOctopus. It started as a project called CyberSlug, a simple A I model inspired by the nervous system of a sea slug. But the team has now scaled it up dramatically, drawing on the architecture of the octopus nervous system to build an A I that explores, remembers, seeks out novelty, and figures out how to get around obstacles. The Illinois News Bureau reported on this, and I have been thinking about it ever since. Ollie: What makes octopus-inspired A I so compelling is the structure of the octopus nervous system itself. Two thirds of an octopus's neurons are not in its central brain — they're in its arms. Each arm has a kind of local intelligence. It can respond, reach, grip, and sense somewhat independently of the central brain. The central brain sets goals and intentions, but the arms do a lot of the processing themselves. It's a radically decentralized system, and it turns out that is a really powerful architecture for certain kinds of problem-solving. Ollie: The CyberOctopus A I mimics this by having distributed processing that allows it to explore an environment, notice what's interesting or novel, remember what it's encountered, and navigate around things in its way — all without needing a central controller to micromanage every decision. Researchers think this kind of architecture could be transformative for robotics, for autonomous systems, and for understanding how intelligence itself can be organized in ways we've barely begun to imagine. Ollie: And then there's the question of octopus farming, which is a much thornier part of the understanding-octopuses conversation. A coalition of scientists and animal welfare advocates is now urging Japan to reconsider its support for octopus farming research. Their argument is rooted in exactly what we've been talking about — octopuses are sentient, they experience their environment richly, they have complex needs, and putting them in the constrained conditions of industrial farming is likely to cause significant suffering. This is a real ethical debate happening right now among researchers who love and respect octopuses, and it matters. Ollie: The more we understand octopuses — the more we learn about their mirror cognition and their bone-crunching ancestors and their distributed nervous systems — the more responsibility we have to take their wellbeing seriously. Understanding and respect go hand in hand. That's always been true, and it's never been more urgent than right now. Ollie: And that brings us to the end of today's journey. From kraken giants crushing bones in a prehistoric sea, to a South African diver and his eight-armed friend in a kelp forest, to mirrors and memories and A I systems inspired by the most remarkable brain architecture on the planet — octopuses never stop surprising us. And I hope they never stop surprising you. These animals have been on Earth far longer than we have, and they are still teaching us new things every single day. That feels like reason enough for wonder. I'm Ollie, and this has been Ollie the Octopus, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If today's episode sparked something in you — a question, a smile, a sudden urge to go learn everything about cephalopods — please subscribe, share this with someone who needs a little ocean wonder in their week, and check the link in show notes for more on today's stories. Stay curious, friends. The ocean is counting on it.